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James and Dostoevsky: The Heiress and the Idiot by John Kimmey, University of South Carolina Although a good man is as hard to find in fiction as in life, the challenge to create a Christ-like character has haunted novelists from Cervantes to Faulkner. In his book on the "picaresque saint" in the work of Camus, Silone, Faulkner, Graham Greene, and Malraux, R. W. B. Lewis defines such a person as a "saintly picaro—the holy wanderer, with his special combination of extraordinary gifts and extraordinary spiritual fraüties; we recognize the type of the disturbing and even troublesome individual who is charity in action" (294). He cites as precursors Don Quixote and Prince Myshkin. Other candidates he might have mentioned are Henry Fielding's Parson Adams, Franz Kafka's Gregor Samsa, and, particularly, Henry James's MiUy Theale in The Wings of the Dove, who has never been associated with this type of character. The American heroine seems at first a surprising addition to the select group until one looks at her career and notes how closely she adheres to the "holy wanderer" archetype represented by Myshkin in The Idiot. Not that James ever read the novel. ActuaUy, we know of only one book by Dostoevsky he did attempt, Crime and Punishment, and he could not finish it because, as he told Robert Louis Stevenson, "the character of Raskolnikov was not objective" (Muchnic 17).1 But he apparently read about The Idiot, for he owned a copy of Vicomte E. M. de Vogüé's Le Roman russe (1886), the most important critical book of the late nineteenth century introducing Russian literature to the West. Although the volume is not marked, according to Adeline R. Tintner "every page has been well-read."2 In the chapter on Dostoevsky, "La Religion de la Souffrance," Vogüé writes of the Russian novelist having at first the idea of "producing another Don Quixote." Then, carried away "with his own creation ," he endows him with "Christ-like qualities" and elevates him "to the moral proportions of a saint" (Vogüé 187-88). Myshkin lives "among a set of usurers, liars, and rascals" who practice "malicious tricks" on the naive hero. Nevertheless, they "respect and venerate him; they feel his influence, and become better men" (Vogüé 189). When James came to write The Wings of the Dove, he employed many of the same motifs, including a crippling illness, and thus linked his work clearly to the fictional tradition of the supremely good The Henry James Review 13 (1992): 67-77 © 1992 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 68 The Henry James Review person who, though flawed, manipulated, and doomed, ultimately becomes a transcendent figure. It is significant that not until 1892 do "we see traces of 'le roman russe' in his [James's] work" (Tintner 237). Two years later he made his first notes on The Wings of the Dove.1 Both novels contain a central character the author had contemplated writing about for a long time. James's work was inspired to a large extent by his Albany cousin Minny Temple, who died early in life at the very moment he was exploring Europe for the first time alone and launching his literary career in earnest. He wrote to his brother William in 1870 that just as he was "crawling from weakness and inaction and suffering into strength and health and hope," she was "sinking out of brightness and youth into decline and death" (HJL I, 224). In his preface he remarks that the idea of a "young person conscious of a great capacity for life, but early stricken and doomed" (AN 288) was before him as long as he could remember. Dostoevsky's novel, too, is "the most personal" of aU his major works, one that "embodies his most intimate, cherished, and sacred convictions" (Frank 303). Furthermore, he had been thinking about such a "positively beautiful person" as a hero for a number of years. Though Prince Myshkin is not modeled on anyone in particular, his seizures and his account of an execution resembled in some detail the author's own epileptic fits and prison experiences. The two authors, then, chose favorite characters and endowed...

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